Paint with the Mixer Brush

The Mixer Brush simulates realistic painting techniques
such as mixing colors on the canvas, combining colors on a brush,
and varying paint wetness across a stroke.

The Mixer Brush has two paint wells, a reservoir and a pickup.
The reservoir stores the final color deposited onto the canvas and
has more paint capacity. The pickup well receives paint only from
the canvas; its contents are continuously mixed with canvas colors.

To load paint into the reservoir, Alt-click (Windows) or Option-click (Mac OS) the canvas. Or, choose a foreground color.

When you load
paint from the canvas, the brush tip reflects any color variation
in the sampled area. If you prefer brush tips of uniform color,
select Load Solid Colors Only from the Current Brush Load pop-up
menu in the options bar.

In the options bar, set tool options. For common options,
see Paint
tool options. For options unique to the Mixer Brush, see
the following:

Current Brush Load swatch

From the pop-up panel, click Load Brush to fill the brush
with the reservoir color, or Clean Brush to remove paint from the brush.
To perform these tasks after each stroke, select the automatic Load or
Clean options.

Preset pop-up menu

Applies popular combinations of Wet, Load, and Mix settings.

Wet

Controls how much paint the brush picks up from the canvas.
Higher settings produce longer paint streaks.

Increasing paint wetness

A.
0% B.
100%

Load

Specifies the amount of paint loaded in the reservoir. At
low load rates, paint strokes dry out more quickly.

Increasing load rates

A.
1% B.
100%

Mix

Controls the ratio of canvas paint to reservoir paint. At
100%, all paint is picked up from the canvas; at 0%, all paint comes
from the reservoir. (The Wet setting, however, continues to determine
how paints mix on the canvas.)

Sample All Layers

Picks up canvas color from all visible layers.

Do one or more of the following:

Drag in the
image to paint.

To draw a straight
line, click a starting point in the image. Then hold down Shift,
and click an ending point.

When using the Brush tool as an airbrush, hold down the mouse
button without dragging to build up color.